


a thousand chances and just one more

by mollivanders



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Reunions, Season/Series 05, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, a much happier/more peaceful start to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 09:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12814149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: He can still picture him, though the image in his mind has grown rusty around the edges, a reminder to himself that Miller has aged. Monty tries to imagine what he looks like now one year gone, two years, six years. Six years can do a lot of damage. Perhaps he’d grown his beard out, or had an injury that dropped his shoulder, or put on more muscle from lack of anything else to occupy him, going as stir crazy as Monty suspects he has gone.(Perhaps – maybe – he’d be just the same.)Monty traces the lines of Miller’s face in his mind, his thumb running over Miller’s sweet lips, and tries to taste him across space and time. A thousand more chances run through his fingers and he grasps at them in turn, promising himself that if he gets one more, just one, he won’t second guess himself again, or worry what Miller will think of him, or whether someone else is watching them.This time, he’ll leap.





	a thousand chances and just one more

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katsumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsumi/gifts).



> Written for leralynne/katsumi as an early birthday gift. She gave me the prompt of "a kiss we had to wait for" ages ago.

They’d been digging for weeks.

Taking the briefest of pauses, Monty wiped his brow before passing another chunk of rubble down the line. Every bone in his body was aching for this chore to be done. The world needed rebuilding, and most of their friends were still trapped beneath the earth.

( _Miller_ was still trapped beneath the earth.)

The sooner they got them all out – the better.

It hadn’t been easy convincing the Martians to help them, let alone not kill them, but after six years of being trapped in a dying space station, Bellamy had been chomping at the bit for a fight – or an alliance. As it turned out, the Martians were more worried about their own planet dying and seized the chance for a new one. Either it hadn’t been that hard to convince them, or – Monty allowed with a grumble to himself – Bellamy had actually learned something from their time on earth, and it had stuck.

They’d been digging their friends out for weeks now, the tenuous reins of their new alliance holding fraught as they all worked together. It was hard to map out the ruined landscape to their memory of Polis but Echo had seemed to remember her old home by instinct if not by memory, and they’d begun at the place she had pointed to.

After six years, he still didn’t quite trust her – but there was hardly any evil plot for her to hatch with most of the world dead.

(He hoped.)

“You alright?” Bellamy asks, coming up beside him with a water canteen. Monty takes it gratefully, gulping down several mouthfuls before shooting Bellamy a disgusted look.

“You don’t have to look so happy. You know that, right?” he asks, acting more disgruntled that he actually feels. It’s weirdly nice to watch Bellamy and Clarke be around each other, like six years of separation did the trick on getting them past all the walls they’d thrown up around each other. That, and Bellamy not going stir crazy from not being able to respond to Clarke’s messages probably helped.

(“We don’t _have_ any spare parts,” Monty had tried to explain a hundred times. “If I give you spare parts for a radio, we stop breathing.”

He’s still pretty sure Bellamy had thought about it.)

“I’m not,” Bellamy lies, unable to keep a smile from the edges of his mouth. “My sister is buried alive, most of the people we know are dead, there’s a chance we won’t get them out before winter – ”

Catching the drift of Monty’s look, Bellamy takes the canteen back. “I could be happier,” he says, and Monty almost laughs.

Almost.

He’s still saving that one for Miller.

+

He’d spent the better part of six years pining. Well, not _pining_ exactly, because there was work to do and he was the only one to do it, but –

Was Miller bored out of his mind? Or was he working as chief of the guard, taking his father’s place? Was he even alive? It had taken about a week in space for that thought to punch through Monty’s thoughts and it had chewed at him for the rest of his years in space. He’d assumed –

Bellamy had said Miller had made it, of course, but Bellamy didn’t know. Not really. None of them did. Nobody knew what had happened after Praimfaya, or whether the bunker had actually survived the collapse of Polis on top of it, or if the machinery would hold up, or any of that. _Nobody knew_.

It was killing him, a little, to think that the last remaining members of the human species could be counted on two hands and Miller not be among them.

After a month in space, Monty is halfway convinced they can make it without air long enough for him to cobble together some spare parts for a radio, send a message down to earth, and then put the system back together again. If he works fast, that is.

(Somehow, he doesn’t do it.)

The Ark really is on its last legs, barely functioning, and they’re always just one terrible disaster away from death. They have enough algae to reprocess between them though, and at week nine Murphy and Emori had come back from a scavenger hunt with a fresh store of undamaged medical supplies. By then, Monty has almost stopped begrudging Murphy from living among them.

(Or at all.)

They were still missing a doctor, but it turned out Echo was a fast learner, eager to earn a place on the ship. It doesn’t improve Bellamy’s mood any though, and if Echo thought it would ingratiate her place among them, her expectations must be failing miserably. It helps, though. Monty can admit that. She helps.

For the most part though, he tries to keep to himself. About fifteen weeks in, they’ve all started to go stir crazy. He’s not alone in this, he knows. They’re all sick of each and having nobody else to talk to; sick of the whirling stars and burning earth; sick of life in space; sick of being back where they started.

They all find their own ways to cope.

Monty, for his part, spends a lot of time dreaming. He spends a lot of time tinkering with spare parts, thinking of a face lost back on Earth, and counts the hours by the turns the Ark makes around the glowing remains of a place he’d barely had time to call home. He wanders off on his own, avoiding the others, and tucks himself into odd corners, staring at the spot where he’s pretty sure they had landed all those months ago.

(He dreams of Miller.)

+

They’re slowly making progress on the remains of Polis, digging out the rubble that might once have been the tower or a marketplace, when the first snow falls. It melts on contact, the earth still too warm for anything to stick, but it lends an urgency to their work that wasn’t quite there before.

A week after that, they find the bunker door.

It’s rusted over, stuck in place, and Bellamy calls for an electric saw from back at camp. While a team goes to collect it in Clarke’s rover, they try banging on the door with a hammer, a loud echoing sound that _must_ be heard down below. _S.O.S._ A pause. _S.O.S._ It’s the only Morse code any of them know, but at least it’s consistent. It’s bound to get somebody’s attention after years of silence.

(If anyone’s listening.)

It’s almost an hour before a response comes – a booming clang that sends a simple message.

They’re alive.

 _Somebody_ is alive down there.

+

On the Ark, Monty had plenty of time to list out his regrets, tend to them, nurture them. He doesn’t blame himself for Jasper, so to speak, or his mother’s death, or the other people they left behind. He understands on a gut level – always has – that some deaths are outside his control.

(It hurts but – he doesn’t let it hurt him any more than it has to.)

Miller though, he damn near _punishes_ himself for.

He’d had a thousand chances, and one. He didn’t take any of them. Maybe he’d thought they’d have more time. Maybe he’d assumed, as they all had, that they’d be on Earth for good now; that they wouldn’t be separated again. After all, every time there had been a parting, Monty and Miller had ended up on the same side of the doors.

(Every time but one.)

He can still picture him, though the image in his mind has grown rusty around the edges, a reminder to himself that Miller has aged. Monty tries to imagine what he looks like now one year gone, two years, six years. Six years can do a lot of damage. Perhaps he’d grown his beard out, or had an injury that dropped his shoulder, or put on more muscle from lack of anything else to occupy him, going as stir crazy as Monty suspects he has gone.

(Perhaps – maybe – he’d be just the same.)

Monty traces the lines of Miller’s face in his mind, his thumb running over Miller’s sweet lips, and tries to taste him across space and time. A thousand more chances run through his fingers and he grasps at them in turn, promising himself that if he gets one more, just one, he won’t second guess himself again, or worry what Miller will think of him, or whether someone else is watching them.

This time, he’ll leap.

(Day by day, he steals away to spare moments, daring to hope as he’d never dared to hope on Earth.)

+

The day the door finally cracks open is the day the clouds part from the sun. Monty blinks against it as the first survivors file out, shielding their eyes and stumbling over the rubble. He spots some Arkadians in the mix that he knows, and Octavia is among them; if she recognizes him she doesn’t register it as she walks past him towards the recovery station. It’s odd; he’d thought she’d been a leader of some kind when Praimfaya hit.

( _Six years_.)

Miller is the last man out.

Monty tracks his ascent from the grave with hungry eyes, drinking in his features both familiar and altered. He’s taller, somehow, but his beard is as cropped close as ever, and he’s walking with a staff of some kind, a ceremonial cloak thrown over his shoulder. For all that –

For all that, he is still Miller.

His eyes lock on Monty a moment later, his focus tearing away from the train of people who had escaped before him, and his face cracks into a smile.

“Monty!” he calls out, taking a step towards him, and the satin of his voice is unchanged, sending a shiver through Monty that coils in his stomach. His eyes are as bright and friendly as ever and Monty doesn’t think; doesn’t stop to worry or wonder. In a second, he’s clambered over the crumbled city between them.

“Miller,” he manages to get out. Then, before he can worry about what he’s doing wrong, Monty pulls him into a burning kiss that fills the six years between them.

(Belatedly, his brain sends out a fearful worry – hopefully Miller doesn’t have a boyfriend.)

But after a belated moment of surprise, Miller grins under Monty’s mouth and wraps his arms around him, lifting him off the ground a little to reach him better. He’s laughing now, a joy that suffuses the kiss, and Monty breaks away with gleaming eyes and too much hope to be contained.

“Welcome back,” Monty adds, trying to suppress a grin and failing as Miller mirrors it.

“Thanks,” Miller says, leaning down to steal another kiss, his arm still snug around Monty’s waist, and Monty makes a sound that might be a gasp or a whimper and Miller pulls him tighter, achingly close.

An amused sounding man clears his throat beside them and they break apart to find Bellamy smirking happily. He claps a hand on Miller’s back, still smiling.

“Good to see you, Miller,” Bellamy says, and then smirks at Monty. “You don’t have to look so happy. You know that, right?”

“Never happier,” Monty says, failing to find any of his characteristic reserve as Bellamy rolls his eyes, leading them back to the rest of the group.

“About time,” Bellamy mutters, and Miller laughs. It’s contagious and suddenly Monty is not just smiling – he’s laughing, Miller’s hand secure in his as they follow Bellamy to the main camp. It feels good; better than good. He really can’t remember the last time life seemed this hopeful, or good.

(Even with all that they’d – he’d – lost. He’s not going to forget it either.)

“It’s good to see you,” Miller murmurs, bumping their shoulders together and adds, “A lot’s happened since I saw you.”

So much had happened. Praimfaya, the six years on the Ark, an entirely lost colony of people found once more. It all pales next to the discovery beside him.

“Come on,” Monty says, pulling him along. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

Finally, for once – they really do have all the time in the world.

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladytharen](http://ladytharen.tumblr.com) on Tumblr if you want to say hi!


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